Marc Hanheide

Founder & CTO of JABAS.ai and Director of the Lincoln Centre for Autonomous Systems (L-CAS) - Deploying autonomous robots in the real world, from European Care Homes to British Fields.

Marc is an Unreasonable Mentor.

Marc Hanheide is co-founder and CTO of JABAS.ai, a startup delivering "Autonomy as a Service" navigation software, mainly for agricultural robots. JABAS.ai's platform enables reliable, unsupervised robot deployment in the demanding environments of commercial horticulture; with robots operating autonomously for months at a time across multiple sites in the UK and Europe. The company works with technology partners and integrators to bring dependable, long-term autonomy to a sector under mounting pressure to automate at scale.

Marc has worked in robotics research since 2006 and has been based in the UK since 2009. As Professor of Intelligent Robotics and Director of the Lincoln Centre for Autonomous Systems (L-CAS), he has secured approximately £30 million in research funding from UKRI (most in collaboration with industry partners) and the EU, supervised more than 16 PhD students, and also directs a Centre for Doctoral Training (in Agri-Food technology). Beyond horticulture, his academic research has deployed autonomous robots across care, logistics, and cultural heritage settings. The Lincoln Agri-Robotics programme, the research foundation underpinning JABAS.ai's core IP, received the Best Research Project for Impact award at the AI & Robotics Research Awards 2025. The University of Lincoln was also awarded the Queen's Anniversary Prize in 2023 for its pioneering work in agri-food technology, the result of collaboration between L-CAS and the Lincoln Institute for Agri-Food Technology.

Marc's core conviction is that truly useful autonomous systems must work reliably and safely not just on demo or pitch day, but over months and years of real-world deployment, getting better on the job every day through machine learning and AI. His focus is on long-term autonomy: technology that earns trust incrementally, adapts continuously, and operates alongside people rather than replacing them. He believes the most consequential robotics is not the kind that makes headlines, but the kind that quietly keeps working.